U.S. News & World Report ranked Auburn's online graduate programs in the publication's first Top Online Education Program Honor Roll.
"Their definition of an excellent online degree program is one where strong student services and technology are provided, the faculty have good credentials, they use teaching practices that engage students and they are selective in admissions," said Drew Clark, director of Institutional Research and Assessment.
"If you got into the top group of at least three of those four criteria, then you get an honor roll ranking."
Analyst Karen Battye said this is the first time U.S. News & World Report has ranked online programs.
"This is the first year they've done the surveys, so there was no real methodology provided to us prior to the survey," she said. "It was just a blank survey with lots of questions, both qualitative and quantitative."
Greg Ruff, director of engineering outreach and continuing education, said his department provided information used to help determine the ranking.
"They asked us to complete a 102-question survey that was completed by this office, a couple people in engineering, communication and marketing and some folks at the University academic side, and that's what the ratings were based on," Ruff said. "There were three schools that were honor schools, and Auburn was one of them."
The online graduate programs in the College of Education ranked fifth in the teaching practices and student engagement category.
"The programs are highly interactive, and I think that's one of the things that made our teaching practices be ranked so high," said Susan Bannon, Learning Resources Center director. "Our faculty are engaged with their distance students just as they would be engaged with their face-to-face students."
The graduate programs in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering were ranked first in admissions selectivity and fifth in student services and technology.
"Most of the students getting a graduate engineering degree are already at work," Ruff said. "So they're taking the (online) course to enhance their job status and personal career and, in a lot of cases, to glean information about what they're already doing. Having it delivered to them is an obvious plus rather than them having to come to campus."
The technology behind Auburn's online graduate programs was developed in the engineering department.
"The reason it was developed here was that we tried a lot of different programs and none of them did what we wanted them to do," Ruff said. "The main problems were the clarity of the images, the ability to see with more than one camera and the ability for anybody to pick it up on anything they had. Most of the delivery systems could not deal with Macs. Ours does."
Content is delivered through live streaming media so students can access lectures online.
"Because it's accessible with almost anybody's system, we tested it to begin with with some soldiers in Afghanistan," Ruff said. "We figured if it worked there, it would work anywhere."
The technology allows for easier communication between distance education students and professors.
"The programs are good because the technology that we use help the students not feel that they are so distant from campus," Bannon said. "The students can receive the information from their professor; they can view the lectures; they can view the class activities as though they are here on campus."
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